Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk*

Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk* JOSEF P. HODIN Oskar Kokoschka, born in Pochlarn, Austria, on March 1, 1886, is a truly cosmopolitan artist. His father was of Czech origin, his mother Austrian. He is claimed today by the Czechs, the Austrians, the Ger- mans, and the English as their leading painter. He never exchanged his Austrian passport for a German one, although it was suggested to him on various occasions. He had a Czechoslovak passport during the years when he stayed in Prague as an emigré, 1934-1938. He spent the years from 1938 to 1953 in England. He lives now in Switzerland, with an English passport, is married to a Czech lady, and today shares with Picasso and Chagall a world-wide fame in the ever-decreasing number of those great artists who established the new art of the twentieth century. His sister, Berta Patocková, was resident in Prague until she died in 1960, and Oskar Kokoschka visited her there. She was married to a former General of the Czechoslovak Army. Kokoschka's brother, who settled down in Liebhartstal near Vienna, bears a Czech name: Bohuslav. The origin of Kokoschka's name is Slavonic, and President T. G. Masa- ryk enjoyed discussing with the artist its etymological roots. The Czech lands made a most remarkable contribution to contemporary culture. Renowned poets and authors - Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Wer- fel, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Karl Kraus - come from this part of the world, as does the progenitor of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, one of the true revolutionaries of our modern age, who, together with Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, changed the fundations of our con- sciousness. Georg Mendel, the founder of modern genetics, was a Mora- vian, and so was Edmund Husserl, the philosopher and initiator of phenomenology, and also Adolf Loos, a friend and supporter of Ko- koschka, a great avant-garde architect, and one of the early theoreti- cians of modern architecture. (Ins Leere gesprochen, Trotzdem). The * For Olda. Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1417 Viennese art historian, Max Dvorak, who conceived the history of art as the history of the human spirit (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte) was of Bohemian origin, as was also the composer, Gustav Mahler. Kokoschka said to me: "My father still spoke Czech, which we could no longer do." His father, who was a jeweller and goldsmith, had made for his journeyman's piece, the chalice for the Chapel of St. Wenceslas in the Cathedral of St. Vitus in Prague. His mother was a beauty who might have stepped straight out of a picture by Manes. "Their workshop in Prague was highly thought of, and the Emperor Franz I is said to have visited it often, in ordinary civilian clothes, to buy a new snuff-box or to see about the setting of a stone, but more often because my grandmother was such a beautiful woman. On such occasions, he would be invited to stay and drink a cup of coffee. I was told that my father, as a young apprentice, was once lent the Emperor's top hat and malacca cane, and that the Emperor freed him from his in- voluntary imprisonment within the top hat where his head had entirely disappeared!" Kokoschka's father lived in a time when the arts and crafts suffered their first shock from the spread of industrialization. He lost his fortune and, finally, his job. "My father was an embittered man", Kokoschka told me. "He hated the whole world - a Dostoievsky character. He was negative, proud, arrogant, impatient of all compromise. He was at war with the world." "We had many relatives in Vienna. One of the nephews by the name of Schebek shot himself on account of a love affair he had with a woman of the aristocracy. Another ran the Kokoschka School for the study of the piano in the Mariahilf district. He was the leading teacher at the Theresianum. Yet another was the Hofrat Glossy, director of the city library. As a boy he had known Grillparzer, and he was an author- ity in the field of Viennese cultural history. My father wanted no con- tact with any of them. The reason was that he was on the defensive because his business was going downhill. He felt it an injustice that he could do nothing about it. He felt himself an artist, and so he became solitary. "He was a remarkably handsome man. His hair retained its original brown till late in life, and he wore a long, luxuriant beard. I once made a drawing of him, but it was not a good one. I felt that he would soon die and something within me held me back. At the age of seventy he was still very strong, so strong that he could lift a chair from the ground 1418 Josef P. Hodin with two fingers. He could speak several languages and he had read a great deal. One of the first books he gave me, and that was before I could read, was the Orbis Pictus of Jan Amos Comenius. Schiller's 'freedom plays' and works of Herder and Lessing were among the books read aloud to us of an evening. Once he brought me a magic lantern with puzzle pictures, then books on films, and, often, drawings, for he knew how much pleasure these gave me. Later he took great interest in my collection of books, and he took charge of my art treas- ures in his own room." In Kokoschka's picture of the harbour of Stockholm can be seen the beginning of that early series of town views, the most important of which were painted in the years from 1924 to 1930. The pictures of the city of Prague were painted between 1934 and 1937 and belong to the middle period. They occupy a special place in the sum total of his work. Kokoschka painted this home town of his paternal ancestors more often than any other. His pictures of Prague are less forthright in colour than those he painted in Dresden. We find in them, rather, that depth of space which characterises his views of London, combined with the luminosity of those painted in the South, in Italy, Spain, and Africa, so that they seem to present, as it were, a synthesis of North and South, of cold and warm; and this is something that corresponds to thfe character of this fabulous city, which Wilhelm von Humboldt ranked among the seven most beautiful cities of the world. In this connection, also, it is worth noting that Kokoschka himself in some of these pictures arrived at a synthesis of his earlier, more graphically detailed style and the strong colour of his later mature work, in which he achieved such tremendous power of expression. This is particularly evident in "Prague from the Villa Kramar", in "Prague, seen from the Schonborngarden", further in "Prague, View of the Banks of the Vltava I and II", and "Prague, View from the Vltava Pier, I-IV". A final picture of the great city, "Prague-Nostalgia", was painted from memory in 1938 in London. Kokoschka has always loved both Prague and Vienna. In his fore- word to an essay by Professor Hans Tietze, Kokoschka wrote in 1943: "Vienna looks with hope towards her sister city, Prague. It is not only their past, but also their future, that connects the spiritual history of related peoples. Prague has been called the most westerly of oriental cities. In her beauty, her spiritual power, her historic character, she stands by Vienna not as a rival but as a companion in a like destiny. Oskar Kokoschka and Masaryk 1419 They are as two lovely sisters, each with her own grace and charm. And above all they are witnesses to a common culture which in the West is a centre of spiritual exchange, showing the East what the West has to offer and what the West signifies for the East." In a letter to me, Dr. Hugo Feigl, the Prague art dealer, later owner of the Feigl Gallery in New York, wrote: "During his stay in Prague, Kokoschka painted six big views and a small one for me, which is the greatest number of pictures he ever painted of any one city in his career as an artist. When Kokoschka had found a suitable point from which to paint his landscape, my honored task was (diplomatically) to ar- range that he be allowed to occupy it undisturbed for some time. And it was no easy task, if you consider all the odd places where Kokoschka chose to set up his easel. On one occasion, it was in the private house of a bank director's widow; on another, it was on the balcony of the water- works office on the banks of the Vltava, peopled by its unsuspecting busy officials, and again, it was at the window in the retreat of the mem- bers of the Order of the Cross. Dr. Vlasak, Grand Master of the Order, whom I knew well, had, as a matter of fact, emptied the room indicated by Kokoschka, and had put it at his disposal for three weeks. Yet another spot chosen by Kokoschka was on the Vysehrad Rock, where we had to clamber around for a whole forenoon like mountaineers, and finally, there were the closed gardens of the American Embassy and the wonderfully dominating position occupied by the villa of the retired and ailing politician, Dr. Kramaf, situated on the old fortifications of the Prague Belvedere. What gave us so much pleasure on these expedi- tions was their invariable success.

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